A little scheming and dreaming on our lovely, peaceful, rural deck in Tokyo led to our first ski trip in Japan. There was no snow anywhere near Tokyo as you can see by what they are wearing here so... where is there snow? This year has been a really bad year for snow in Japan. But why not explore? We all had our ski equipment, including Sarah with her brand-new-never-been-skied-on-powder-skis...
We rented a car, drove and drove and drove past Nagano to Hakuba. There, sure enough, just driving into the final valleys... there was snow; not much but there it was. Alexis and Sarah recovered from colds while Shelley and I took our first turns this year at a sprawling intermediate resort with a few runs open and LOTS of people; so nice to be in the snow!!
The "expert" ski outfit!
We enjoyed playing cards in the evening at our lodge around this special Japanese coffee table with a heater under the blanket so your legs stay warm as you sit on the tatami mat.
The next day we discovered that there had been 25cm of fresh snow at the Cortina resort up the valley so we scooted up there for a day on the slopes, Alexis and Sarah renting skis because of concerns about obstacles.
Yes, there was snow!
So quickly we headed off to the "expert onry" slopes to get some powder before it was skied out by the crowds. .
Our first time to ski through tall grass fields!
Sarah was thrilled to ski in bamboo patches.
As the day progressed and the snow got skied out, Shelley and I did a run down the back side of the ridge to a lift that I saw at the bottom of the bowl. We had a pretty scraped up run down from there to... an entirely different resort in the next valley! We didn"t realize how dense these resorts were. We went to the bottom to find that the next bus was an hour and a half later so we packed our skis on our backs and boot packed back to our original resort. Lesson learned; which ski hill resort that the lift you are looking belong to?
A look at the line-up to get back on our hill had us decide to call it a day and enjoy some nice coffee.
The following day, with most of the snow scraped off the slopes we decided to hike up one of the lateral ridges of the resort to find some turns.
We had a chilly but lovely Onigiri lunch at the top ...
before coming down for another lovely meal of tempura.
We saw that Hakuba is a lovely ski area with big mountains and long runs and lots of potential for back-country. We just need to come back when there is snow.
For variety we headed off to our next hotel that we had booked on-line, thinking that it was in the middle of nowhere near a hot-springs town. Ah ha, surprise! As we wound our way through little villages we suddenly came across another sprawling ski resort with our hotel plunked right in the middle of the slope. Not only was it ski in and ski out, we had a choice of ways to get to the hotel; a conveyor belt that was VERY slow or a tracked van!
The resort was a very densely developped resort with over 15 lifts all seemingly randomly spread over the hill with various odd ways of connecting with each other... and very little altitude gain. Each run was lined with hotels and guest houses but about one third of these were abandoned.
The hills were packed (for our standards)...
And Sarah and Alexis swooped down each run with about 3 turns.
Alexis kept saying; this is not steep enough!
A New Years Eve dinner in town at the only restaurant that was open and the only guests in the restaurant;
And a torch parade that we stumbled on at the ski hill along with fire works.
Each day of our trip was finished off in the luxury of a hot onsen bath. We challenged Sarah and Alexis to find us a new hotspring every night and they did.We soaked in large and small, new and old, crowded and private onsens all over the valley. It was very civilized!
We were thrilled to discover the possibilities of skiing in Japan and to sort out where we do and do not want to again in the future. We just need to make sure that we go when there is more snow... and maybe less people (if that is possible?).
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